FASHIONISTA STRIKES BACK--AND OTHER BOOK NEWS
The Substance of Style gets its first negative review, (predictably, if I'd actually thought about it) in The New York Observer. Josh Patner, who is "writing a book about his adventures in the fashion business," doesn't approve of my unsnobby, and insufficiently trendy, take on aesthetic pleasure and meaning. For him "style" is a mark of personal superiority and neither I nor the people I write about have it. Maybe if the book were called "the substance of aesthetics" he'd get it. Or not. At any rate, I'd love to lock him in a room with Tom Carson, the Esquire columnist who reviewed TSOS in the October Atlantic.
In this article from the NYT Sunday Styles section, I'm quoted on why fashion is no longer cool (or why, to put it another way, people like Patner are so unhappy these days):
"Traditionally, we thought of fashion as something that came from houses, editors, designers, experts, and that has very much gone by the boards," said Virginia Postrel, the author of "The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture and Consciousness" (HarperCollins), a book that examines the cultural obsession with aesthetics.
"Part of what made fashion seem like high school," Ms. Postrel said, was the existence of " 'in' groups, 'in' people, who knew and decided what was cool."
In other book news, columnist Suzanne Fields of The Washington Times writes of "women--and men--who rarely pause to accessorize crowd[ing] into the conference center at the American Enterprise Institute" for my talk. If New York is the land of style snobs, Washington is, stereotypically, the opposite. But the questions after my talk in fact indicated a keen interest in the subject--including not just the big economic and social questions but, inevitably, the color of my fingernail polish ("I'm Not Really a Waitress"). You can watch the talk here, assuming that, unlike me, you can get Microsoft's Media Player to work.
Also spinning off from the AEI talk, Arnold Kling applies aesthetic analysis to the changing economics of college educations.